I was born in Poonch (Kashmir) and now I live in Norway. I oppose war and violence and am a firm believer in the peaceful co-existence of all nations and peoples. In my academic work I have tried to espouse the cause of the weak and the oppressed in a world dominated by power politics, misleading propaganda and violations of basic human rights. I also believe that all conscious members of society have a moral duty to stand for and further the cause of peace and human rights throughout the world.

Sunday, March 29, 2015

President Barack Obama traced the origins of
Islamic State militants back to the presidency of George W. Bush and the
invasion of Iraq back in 2003, arguing that its growth was an
“unintended consequence” of the war.

In an interview with Vice News,
President Obama said the rise of Islamic State (IS, also known as
ISIS/ISIL) can be directly linked to America’s excursion into Iraq under
Bush.

“Two things: One is, ISIL is a direct outgrowth of Al-Qaeda in Iraq that grew out of our invasion,” Obama said in an interview with VICE News. “Which is an example of unintended consequences. Which is why we should generally aim before we shoot.”

Obama stated that he is “confident” a coalition consisting of 60 nations “will slowly push back ISIL out of Iraq,” but
added that the challenge of stopping extremism won’t stop unless there
is a political solution to the internal strife affecting so many
countries in the Middle East.

“What I’m worried about” he said, “is even if ISIL is
defeated, the underlying problem of disaffected Sunnis around the world –
but particularly in some of these areas including Libya, including
Yemen – where a young man who’s growing up has no education, has no
prospects for the future, is looking around and the one way he can get
validation, power, respect, is if he’s a fighter.”

“That’s a problem we’re going to have, generally. And we can’t
keep on thinking about counterterrorism and security as entirely
separate from diplomacy, development, education.”

Those of us who know the nature of the beast could not have been surprised by the results of the Israeli election.

Like many of my friends, I was also relieved that a liberal Zionist
government was not elected. It would have allowed the charade of the
“peace process” and the illusion of the two-state solution to linger on while the suffering of the Palestinians continues.

As always, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu
himself provided the inevitable conclusion when he declared the end of
the two-state solution — inviting us all to the long overdue funeral of
an ill-conceived idea that provided Israel with international immunity
for its colonialist project in Palestine.

The power of the charade was on show when the world and local pundits
unrealistically predicted a victory for liberal Zionism, an Israeli
ideological trend that is near extinction — embodied by the Zionist
Union list headed by Isaac Herzog and Tzipi Livni.

Sunday, March 08, 2015

Nasir Khan, March 8, 2015 On March 3, 2015, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel
delivered his speech before a joint session of the US Congress. His
reception was of a kind, which has amused very many of us around the
world. Still, we may ask: For what was Netanyahu accorded such a heroic
reception and standing ovations? Only the AIPAC, the Zionist lobbyists
or US Congress may have the answer. Somehow, it seemed the US Congress
had finally found the right man, almost a messianic figure, a saviour,
who was among them to their great delight! All they had to do to show
their esteem and devotion. This they did and in abundance.During his speech, the members rose on their feet repeatedly as if
they heard something novel. What he offered was only a theatrical
performance that could easily have moved a Sunday school congregation
but was hardly worth a fig for experienced legislators and politicians.
Indeed, his deceptive rhetoric in his fluent American English was well
suited for the audience. However, a few things did not tally with facts.
First, he is not a messianic figure or a hero. Netanyahu is a vile
politician, a ruthless Zionist leader who has committed the horrendous
crime of genocide in Gaza only a few months earlier. ‘The fact that his
obnoxious performance was received so warmly in Congress … is not
surprising, but it is nonetheless discouraging for anyone interested in
peace and foreign policy restraint,’ wrote Daniel Larison in The
American Conservative.In his speech, Netanyahu did what he could to sabotage the nuclear
deal with Iran that the five permanent members of the United Nations
Security Council and Germany are hoping to finalise soon. Just to
pre-empt the deal he unleashed his foray of misleading claims that was
to scare Congress and the American people. A nuclear deal with Iran was
therefore a potential danger to the world and Netanyahu was only trying
to save the world. Such scaremongering no doubt has many followers in
Congress who will do anything to implement the Zionist agenda and block
any US-Iran rapprochement.Netanyahu said: ‘In the Middle East, Iran now dominates four Arab
capitals: Baghdad, Damascus, Beirut and Sana. And if Iran’s aggression
is left unchecked, more will surely follow. So at a time when many hope
that Iran will join the community of nations, Iran is busy gobbling up
the nations.’Oh, really? Let us pause for a minute and see what the facts are.
Iran has been a victim of imperial aggression for long. It is common
knowledge that in 1953 the British and American governments overthrew
the democratically elected government of Prime Minister Dr Mohammad
Mossadegh and installed the Shah who proved to a loyal servant of his
patrons. He furthered the U.S. interests in the region and was a close
ally of Israel. In 1979, the Shah was overthrown and the Islamic regime
took over power. The United States opposed the new rulers, not because
they had introduced a religious system but because they opposed the role
of US imperialism in the Iran during the oppressive rule of the Shah.With the tacit approval of Washington, in 1980 the Iraqi president
Saddam Hussein foolishly attacked and started the Iran-Iraq War that
lasted until 1988. This long war proved disastrous for both Iraq and
Iran. We should keep in mind it was not Iran that started this war. Iran
has not invaded any country for over 200 years. No doubt, Tehran has
regional interests but it has no ambitions to invade or conquer any
neighbouring land or territory. If Netanyahu asserts to the contrary
then he is doing it gain support for war from Congress,
neo-conservatives and war hawks in America. He continues to threaten if
US will not stop Iran, then he will do it. He has done his utmost to
push America to war with Iran because it would serve Israel’s strategic
interests in the Middle East.In fact, Iran has no quarrel with Israel if the Zionists end the
illegal occupation of Palestine and let the Palestinian people decide
their destiny, live in freedom and dignity. Iran’s support for the Assad
regime in Syria in the ongoing civil war has not been motivated to
conquer Syria. The situation in Lebanon has been precarious due to the
Israeli wars of aggression and military incursions. The Hezbollah with
the support of Iran has confronted the Israeli aggressors but it is not
the sole political force in Lebanon. The right-wing Christian militias
have had Israel as a patron for many decades. Iran has no control over
the Houthi coup in Yemen. The ‘gobbling up of nations’ by Iran is an
absurd assertion by a warmonger.If we guess what Netanyahu is good at then the first thing that
strikes about him is his capacity to lie, deceive and manipulate others.
At present, he has directed his energies to thwarting a nuclear deal
with Iran and creating confusion between the powers involved in the
negotiations. Because of his enormous political influence in Congress,
and support of the AIPAC and the rest of the Israel lobby he can thwart
the attempts of negotiators to find a solution. There lies the danger.
In such a case, he will be free to push Washington for more punitive
sanctions against Iran. In any case, his goal remains to involve the
United States in a war on Iran as he previously did in the case of Iraq.
Once Iran is demolished as a political force in the region, as happened
with Iraq after the US invasion of Iraq, then Israel would be the sole
undisputed regional superpower in the Middle East. That will enable the
Zionists to pursue their objectives of further expansion and political
control over the rest of the Middle East.The Israeli leaders know that a peaceful outcome of the nuclear talks
can have positive effects on US-Iran relations. They see it as a danger
to their position and power within and over the United States. If
United States can loosen the grip of Zionists and choose normal
diplomatic and trade relations with Iran then that would mean the
lessening of tensions in the region. Such a change in policy towards
Iran will create an atmosphere of mutual trust and co-operation between
the two countries. Other countries closely allied with America (except
Israel) will also be happy to normalise relations with Iran. However, in
the way of any such change stands Israel. It will not let United States
follow such a course. As long as there is an unconditional support for
Israel in Congress and American ruling elite, any change in US policy
towards Iran will not be easy.The Zionist leader used all deceptive ploys to make false charges of
an Iranian threat to Israel and the rest of the world. He referred to
the Holocaust and ‘Munich’, because the ‘genocidal’ Iranian regime
wanted to kill all the Jews. To accentuate the effect of his tirade on
Iranian threat, he referred to a story in the Book of Esther about a
‘powerful Persian viceroy … who plotted to destroy the Jewish people
2,000 years ago’ and ‘another attempt by another Persian potentate to
destroy us’. Here this dishonest leader is distorting the facts again.
In fact, in the olden times, Jews were well integrated in the Persian
empires and Persians protected them. For instance, the great conqueror
Cyrus the Great, the founder of the Achaemenid Empire, captured Babylon
in 538 BC. He freed the Jews from their former captors and allowed them
to return to their native land. They were free to practise their
religion freely. He also started rebuilding the Second Temple at
Jerusalem; however, he died before the temple was completed. During the
reign of Darius the Great the temple was completed. Such are the facts
of history, which the Zionist leader did not want to present to
Congress.Only ignorant people will take the bait of a threat from Iran for
real because there is no such threat. The Zionist leaders of Israel have
been busy in scare mongering and nurturing such a non-existent threat
for their geo-political objectives. For serious political observers and
thoughtful politicians the whole game is only a baseless Zionist
fabrication. Obviously, because of the Zionist power in the United
States, there is much hostility towards Iran. That meets the domestic
and regional interests of people like Netanyahu and other Israeli
leaders; they are quite happy with this untenable situation. The speech
by Netanyahu should be an eye-opener for the naïve gung hu Americans.
But perhaps this writer is being over-optimist!Only Israel has the stockpiles of nuclear warheads in the Middle
East. We all know that. But Israeli leaders never say a word that they
possess these deadly weapons, which can destroy the whole region in
minutes. Even if (a big if though) Iran develops a nuclear device as a
deterrent at some time in the future, say in 20 years, will it ever
think of using it against Israel that has stockpiles of these weapons?
The answer is absolutely in the negative. One thing is certain: Israel
will wipe out Iran in minutes. The people of Iran are not so
short-sighted; nor are their leaders ignorant of the reality of Israeli
and American nuclear arsenal. At the same time, Israel is the only
nuclear country that is keeping its nuclear a secret, let’s call it an
open secret, which has not signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty,
an international treaty, opened for signature on July 1, 1968 to limit
the spread of nuclear weapons. It does not submit to IAEA inspections
either.This Zionist leader on whose deceptive words US Congress danced is
the man who killed over two thousand Palestinians in Gaza last year and
caused devastation on a scale that can be compared with the destruction
of Warsaw and Stalingrad at the hands of Nazi Wehrmacht. This
unscrupulous leader is blaming the Hamas without saying a word that it
is Israel that is keeping Gaza under siege; Gaza is the largest prison
in the world. At the same time, the colonisation of the West Bank and
East Jerusalem goes on unabated. Israeli rulers are systematically
crushing the voice of a captive people who want liberation from the
Zionist yoke and oppression. All this happens because Israel gets US
financial and military assistance for whatever it does in the occupied
Palestine. The reception of Netanyahu in Congress on March 3, 2015 was a
grand spectacle of the Zionist power over the United States of America.

This is a
good book for Marxist scholars to review some important basic concepts
and a good book to include in a graduate course on the early writings of
Marx. It increases the understanding of Marx in two important areas.
First, it clarifies the logical development that took place in Marx’s
thinking as he crossed the boundary from democrat to communist. Second,
it gives a precise description of the relationship between Marx’s
fundamental worldview and those of Hegel and Feuerbach.

Not that
others have not covered this territory before, it is just that Nasir
Khan does it as well or better. Khan accomplishes this by vigorously
focusing his research. He examines the period from March 1843 to August
1844, concentrating on three works by Marx: ‘Contribution to the
Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right’, ‘On the Jewish Question’, and
‘Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844’. He further delimits his
work by examining only the basic topic of alienation.

Khan
demonstrates that at the time of writing the ‘Critique’, (in March
through September of 1843, at the age of 25) Marx still thought that
full political rights for all people and democracy would solve the
problem of human alienation. In the ‘Critique’, Marx calls for the full democratization of the state (130).
A month or two later, writing in ‘On the Jewish Question’ and his
‘Introduction to the Critique’, Marx rejects such a partial, purely
political solution to the problem. Marx now calls for the abolition of
the state (131).

This
clarification alone makes the book important to Marxist scholars. The
transition of Marx from democrat to communist is so swift that it is
easy to miss or forget. It often appears that historical
materialism just emerges full blown from the head of Marx. Khan
carefully refutes this by tracing the progressive steps in Marx’s
thinking from the ‘Critique’ to the ‘Economic and Philosophic
Manuscripts’. He shows that Marx goes from criticism of religion to
criticism of philosophy, from criticism of philosophy to criticism of
the state; from criticism of the state to criticism of society; and
finally from criticism of society to criticism of political economy and
private property (145).

Khan’s
second clarification involving the Hegel-Feuerbach-Marx relationship
also merits study. George Plekhanov in his chief work Fundamental Problems of Marxism
(1908), spent the first 20 pages complaining that the Marxists of his
day were unfamiliar with the works of Hegel and Feuerbach, and thus had a
distorted picture of what Marx was all about. This complaint still
rings true today. Khan gives a clear, demystified model of the
relationship.

This is not
an easy thing to do. In works about Marx, one often reads how Marx
turned Hegel on his head, or how he criticized Feuerbach for only
conceiving of man abstractly and not as an historical and sensuous
being. Yet the exact relationship among Marx’s concepts and those of Hegel and Feuerbach’s are more interesting.

Khan
examines how Hegel had thought he had overcome alienation by showing
that ultimately man was God (absolute spirit) in self-alienation (52).
Feuerbach reversed this formula and turned Hegel upside down to show
that the concept of God was really man in self-alienation. Marx deeply
appreciated Feuerbach for this, but realized he had only challenged the
top of the Hegelian system. Feuerbach had correctly criticized
humanity’s alienation from in its holy form—religion, but not in its
unholy forms—the state and private property. Marx attacked Feuerbach for
not taking this next obviously necessary step. Marx himself took this
step in his later writings. What Feuerbach had done to the crowning
religious part of Hegel’s system, Marx did to the rest of it. Marx
appreciated Hegel, on the other hand, for his introduction of the
historical method into philosophy; i.e., for showing spirit as
historically evolving through dialectical conflict. Marx simply replaced
Hegel’s Alienated God-Spirit by actual historical man as the true
subject of history and ran Hegel’s film backward to reveal that far from
having overcome alienation through Hegel’s philosophy, actual man was
more alienated than ever by his real socio-economic conditions. This set
the stage for Marx’s later works when he delved ever deeper into the
exact nature of those alienating conditions and came up with solutions
for them.

In the
shadowy background of Khan’s book stands Louis Althusser’s anti-humanist
theory, as presented in ‘For Marx’ and ‘Reading Capital’. Althusser put
forward the theory of an epistemological break in Marx’s works that
turned them from reflecting a humanist ideology into a new science of
society. Khan refers to this theory obliquely several times and firmly
rejects it. Khan maintains ‘Marx’s ideas regarding humanist perspective
and the question of alienation show continuity, but with important
differences in the content and form of the concept and theory of
alienation in the period under review’ (19). Khan’s work
will give comfort to those who oppose Althusser’s theory, but because it
concentrates so strongly on the early works, it really cannot be
considered a strong refutation. Althusser would certainly grant Khan’s
thesis that Marx’s early works are strongly influenced by humanism. It
is the later works that Khan does not really examine that Althusser
would contend go beyond humanism.

Khan writes
in an easy, clear and thoughtful style. His writing is pleasantly
non-polemical. Khan declares, ‘I have tried to present Marx’s views on
alienation as dispassionately as possible and have not let my own likes
and dislikes dictate the inquiry’ (18). It is to his credit that he
presents conflicting views on many issues quite fairly.

One hears common talk of Marxism being dead as a result of the Marxist parties in Eastern Europe losing state power. Yet,
Khan’s book proposes that the essence of Marxism is the overcoming of
alienation, and holding state power is only a small part of that. He
suggests that Marx thought of Communism in three stages. In the crude
stage, equal distribution and consumption are emphasized without an
understanding of the mechanism of production. In the second stage, the
proletariat controls state power and thinks of society in terms of pure
politics. The third stage is the positive appropriation of the human
essence by and for man (246-52). If Khan is right, events in the early
1990s in Eastern Europe should have about as much effect on Marxist
Philosophy as the Fall of the Roman Empire had on Christianity.